I’m sure you’ve probably heard the saying “You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the girl,” or “you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl”…. there are many variations of this saying, but to an extent, it’s true. No matter where or how you grew up, and no matter what you do to get away from it, part of it stays with you, no matter what.

The trailer I grew up in had no running water. We would go to the local laundry mat to wash clothes, and when we were done we’d unload the car with about 30 empty milk jugs and we’d fill them up in the sink, and carry them back out to the car so we could take them home and have water for the next week.

We had a neighbor who lived up on a hill that looked down on our trailer, and every once in a while she’d have on of those “Christian” moments, and would want to help us. So, she’d let us use her outside water hookup to fill up the milk jugs and we’d carry them two at a time back to our trailer, it was about a ¼ a mile walk, and the drive way from her house to ours ran perallel to the main highway and I was so embarrassed, I just knew all my friends from school would be going up or down the road, and wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore.

We use to take sponge baths in the bathroom. It was a treat anytime we stayed at a friend’s house and actually got to take a real shower.

A lot of times we could afford the most basic of things. One of the things we sometimes did not have was toilet paper. My mom worked at the college, and therefore got the newspaper for free. She’d bring it home every night, and that’s what we used for toilet paper. Since there wasn’t running water, we only flushed the toilet once a week. The bathroom always smelled of feces. We’d use the newspaper to wipe ourselves, and then put it in the trashcan, and close the toilet lid. Then every week, we’d fill up the toilet tank in order to flush it.

I haven’t had to use newspaper as toilet paper in, 6 years, yet sometimes I find myself reaching toward the trashcan thinking I still can’t put paper in the toilet.

Sometimes it’s the simplest, most basic things in life that, make you remember where you came from.

Okay, so my first official blog…ummm…. where to begin…so much to tell…Well, I am by nature a very private person, so the whole blogging concept, is going to be kind of hard to get the hang of, but I’m going to do my best…. I guess I should probably start with some of the basics about me.

I’m a 24-year-old female who grew up in a small little town outside of Blacksburg, VA…yep Virginia Tech…that Blacksburg…I grew up with a single mom and two brothers; I’m in the middle. My older brother is David, and he’s…. 27 (I’m pretty sure.) And my little brother, John is 22…. I’ve always been much closer to my little brother, but love them both very much…my mom pretty much spent the last 20 some years raising us, pretty much on her own, my grandmother (or Granny) helped out a lot, but my father was pretty much MIA…my step mother tried quite a bit to make him be a good father, but, you can’t really make someone do that…he use to pay 75 dollars a month for child support for us, yep 75 total…so we were nearly always struggling…my mom worked full-time and tried to attend school as much as possible, and although I had a happy childhood, there was a lot of basic things that were missing, most of the time our heat didn’t work, we had a kerosene heater we kept in our kitchen and we huddle around in winter, or sometimes the stove, but electricity was expensive so, normally the kerosene heater…we’d have the smell of kerosene baked into us, and no matter how much scrubbing, you couldn’t make it go away…the electricity only worked in half of our trailer…we could never afford to have someone come fix it…or find out why it didn’t work…our front steps were rotting through, and there was no one to help fix them…our cars always had problems…and I learned a lot about being self-sufficient…to this day I am the only girl I know who can charge her oil or a flat…we were poor, there is no denying, but I learned so much from that, and that’s what I want to share here…you must be thankful for what you have, no matter how unfortunate you may think your life is.

Well…like I said, I grew up in a very small south western Virginia town (very rural area) and when I graduated high school moved to a pretty large coastal city…. I moved there because my (now) ex-husband was in the Navy and I was sick of having a long distance relationship with him, so I packed up and moved 6 hours away from home to be with him, well…obviously that didn’t work out so well, but I love the area I’m in, and don’t plan on going anywhere…. I well address that whole ex-husband thing in another blog….

I am actually in the process of moving in with my boyfriend of two years, we’ll call him J…. oh and just for the record, all the names above have been changed…I won’t use any real names of people in my life…that a way they stay anonymous also…but back to J…. he’s a fantastic man, and really enough great things could never be said about him, unfortunately right now he’s sick, so he’s not a very pleasant person to be around, but then again, most people aren’t pleasant when they’re sick…but anyways, he’s 42 years old, yep 18 years difference, which, well, you’ll soon see in future post, that it really is not that bad of a thing.

So, I graduated high school and moved away from home and have earned my Associate’s degree in general studies…and now, well, I’m not 100% sure what I want to do…you see, I’ve always loved writing, so I was considering going into journalism, but, that’s an extremely competitive field, and either you’re great, or you don’t have much of a future…so I considered business…I’m pretty good at it, right now I work in a car electronics shop and I’ve handled everything from payroll and inventory to personnel matters and scheduling, so I’ve got a pretty good grasp of it, but I happen to work around a lot of 40-somethings who hate there job and can’t really go anywhere else, because that’s all they know…so I want to do something I love…and I love food, I love to cook and I love to try new stuff, but if I become a chef, well they work all kinds of strange hours and it’d be kind of hard to have a family and never be home at night, on weekends or holidays…which is when people eat out and therefore chefs have to be working…so, I’m considering food writing, but we’ll see how that turns out…